Ann-Margret “Maggie” Yonan
California
Zinda-November 12, 2007
Many individuals, religious groups and biblical scholars have been fascinated with the Bible for the last two thousand years, depending on their literary, historical, or religious interest.
The five books of Moses, (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) which constitute the Pentateuch, (meaning the five scrolls in Greek) known as the Torah in Hebrew, have been the subject of much debate, and biblical scholars have conducted hundreds of investigations to determine whether or not Moses did indeed write them, as the ancient world came to believe for so long. Nowhere does the Bible say Moses wrote the five books that have come to be known as “The Books of Moses.” Then how is it that we came to believe Moses wrote these books, and why are they called the Books of Moses?
Many of the investigations that have been conducted over a period of six hundred years, have enabled us to understand what prompted these beliefs to begin with, and how each scholarly investigation led to a different stage
The first stage of investigation into the Bible began in the eleventh century, when most everyone still believed and accepted that Moses wrote the five books, but the investigators suggested that a few lines were added here and there. This debate was mostly initiated by Isaac Ibn Yashush, a Jewish Court physician in Muslim Spain, who pointed out that a list of Edomite kings that appears in Genesis 36 names kings who lived long after Moses was dead, suggesting the writer of the Pentateuch lived after Moses. The response to his conclusion was that Abraham Ibn Ezra, a twelfth-century Rabbi called him “Isaac the blunderer,” and recommended that his book be burned! But amazingly enough, Abraham seemed to have his own doubts about who wrote these five books, and alluded that some of the Biblical passages appeared not to be written by Moses’ own hands because they referred to Moses in the third person, using terms that Moses would not have used, describing places that Moses would not have been familiar with, and using language that suggested another time in which Moses had not lived. Ibn Ezra was not willing to state these opinions in public, and thus wrote, “If you understand, then you will recognize the truth.” In another note relating to some contradictory passages, he wrote, “And he who understands will keep silent.”
In the fourteenth century Damascus, the scholar Bonfils accepted Ibn Ezra’s evidence, but was not willing to keep silent. He wrote, “And this is evidence that this verse was written in the Torah later, and Moses did not write it, rather, one of the later prophets wrote it.” Then in the fifteenth century, Tostatus, Bishop of Avila also stated that certain passages, mainly, the death of Moses, could not have been written by Moses, and that perhaps Joshua, Moses’ successor wrote it. But by the sixteenth century, Carlstadt, a contemporary of Luther, stated that the account of Moses’ death was written in the same style as texts that precede it. This meant that Joshua could not have merely added some lines to a Mosaic manuscript, and raised the questions about what exactly was Mosaic and what was added by someone else.
In the second stage of the process, the investigators suggested that Moses wrote the five books but that editors went over them later, adding occasional phrases of their own. In the sixteenth century, Andreas Van Maes, a Flemish Catholic, and two Jesuit scholars, Benedict Pereira and Jacques Bonfrere, thought that Moses did write the original texts but that later on, writers expanded upon them.
In the third stage of the investigation, scholars concluded outright that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. The first to say it was Thomas Hobbes, a British philosopher in the seventeenth century. Hobbes collected examples of cases where some text would read, “to this day.” This suggested that these were phrases of later writers who are describing something that endured over a period of time. Four years later, Isaac de la Pyrere, a French Calvinist who openly declared that it was certain that Moses did not write the five books of the Bible, citing a verse in Deuteronomy which states, “These are the words that Moses spoke to the children of Israel across the Jordan.” De la Pyrere pointed out that these words appeared to be written by someone in Israel, across the waters of the river Jordan, and Moses had never been to Israel in his life. De la Pyrere’s book was burned and banned, and he was arrested and told that he would have to become Catholic and recant his views to the Pope, and he did!
At around the same time, the philosopher Spinoza, in Holland, published a critical analysis, outlining the problematic passages, and demonstrating they were not isolated incidents that could be explained one by one. On the contrary, they were pervasive throughout all five books of Moses. These were the third person accounts of Moses, which Moses would have never said. For example, in Deuteronomy 34, there is a sentence that reads, “There never arose a prophet in Israel like Moses.” This would obviously indicate that it was someone who lived long after Moses, to be able to qualify such a statement. Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism and condemned by Protestants as well as Catholics. His book was placed on the Catholic index, thirty seven edicts were issued against it, and an attempt was made on his life.
A short time after that, Richard Simon, a French protestant who had converted to become a Catholic priest, published a book intended to be critical of Spinoza, in which he declared that the Pentateuch had been written by Moses, but some scribes had collected, organized, and elaborated upon the old texts. According to Simon, these scribes had been prophets, guided by the divine spirit. His contemporaries did not want to hear that any part of the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, so he was also attacked and dismissed from his ministerial order. His book was also put on the Catholic Index and he was imprisoned in the tower.
Apparently Simon’s idea that writers of the Pentateuch had assembled these texts out of old sources at their disposal, was an important step on the way to discovering who wrote the Bible, to the extent that it prepared the way to deal with a new item of evidence that was developed in the following century, by three different investigators: The doublet. Simply put, the doublets were the same stories being told twice and in a different manner throughout the five books of Moses. There are two different stories of creation, two different stories of the covenant between God and Abraham, two different stories of naming Isaac, the son of Abraham, two different stories of Jacob’s revelation at Beth-El, two stories of God changing Jacob’s name to Israel, two different stories of Moses getting water from a rock at a place called Meribah, and two different stories of the flood, etc. The most common two different stories were that of God’s name. In one story he was referred to as Yahweh, (the mispronounced Jehovah) and in the other story referring to the deity as simply “God,” or Elohim The doublets lined up into two groups of parallel versions of stories, and each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity it used. This supported the hypothesis that someone had taken two different old documents, cut them up and pasted them together to form the stories of the Bible. In this manner, the next stage came at a time in which Biblical scholars went about separating the strands of the two old source documents.
In the eighteenth century, three independent investigators arrived at the same conclusion based on such studies. A German minister named H.B. Witter, a French medical doctor named Jean Astruc, and a German professor named J.G. Eichhorn. At first, it was thought that one of the versions of the stories in Genesis was an ancient text, written by Moses himself. Later, they thought that both versions were from old sources that Moses had used to write his work. Eventually, however, they concluded that both of these sources had to come from writers who lived after Moses. As their investigations developed further, each step of the process was leading less and less to Moses himself.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, this two-source hypothesis was expanded into four! In other words, there were not just doublets, but triplets, then quadruplets. This came about when a young German scholar, W.M.L. De Wette, in his dissertation, hypothesized that the fifth book of the five books of Moses, (Deuteronomy) was different in language from the other four books.
Now we had a working hypothesis by which we can move forward and open the book of Genesis and be able to identify the writings of two, or even three authors on the same page. At this stage scholars knew there was also an editor, (a cutter and paster) who combined the source documents into a single story, and as many as four different authors who contributed to one page of the Bible. Still, no one knew for sure who these authors were, when they lived, why they wrote, and who this editor that combined them was, and why he combined them in the way he did, rather than re-write them.
The evidence, thus far, revealed that four different source documents were combined into one continuous history. The four documents were given an alphabet name. The document that was associated with the divine name of Yahweh/Jehovah was called J. The document that referred to the divine as GOD, (Elohim) was called E. The third document that dealt largely with legal sections and priests was called P. The source that was found strictly in Deuteronomy was called D.
The question now was, how to uncover the history of these documents, who wrote them, what time period they lived, why four different versions, and did each writer know of the other’s existence, how they were preserved, and how they were combined? The first step was to try to uncover the order in which they were written, and what stages of religious development in Israel did they reflect. This approach was the nineteenth century Hegelian method of Historical development of civilization. Two major investigators stand out in this period: One of them was Carl Heinrich Graf, who tried to uncover the order these texts were written, and the other, Wilhelm Vatke, who tried to trace the development of ancient Israel’s religion, attempting to separate early from late stages of the religion.
Graf concluded that the J and E documents were the oldest version of the biblical stories, in so far as they were not aware of matters that were treated in other documents, and that D was later than J and E. Vatke, on the other hand concluded that J and E reflected a very early stage in the development of the Israelite religion, when it was based on nature/fertility, and that D reflected the stage at which the religion of the Israelites was based on the prophets, (the spiritual/ethical stage). He regarded the P document as that which reflected the latest stage of Israel’s religious development, which was priestly, based on priests, ritual, sacrifices, and law.
Both of these two works of Vatke and Graf pointed in the same direction, which proved that the laws and most of the narratives have nothing to do with the times in which Moses lived, much less written by Moses, not even of life in Israel in the days of prophets, and kings of Israel. They were documents written by someone who lived toward the end of the biblical period.
At this point in time, scholars had reached the conclusion that biblical Israel as a nation was not governed by law for its first six centuries, but Vatke’s and Graf’s works came to dominate biblical studies for a hundred years primarily because of one man’s work. This man was Julius Wellhausen, who lived from 1844-1918 and who did extensive research into biblical scholarship. Wellhausen brought the works of all other investigators together and organized them into a comprehensive thesis.
Wellhausen accepted Vatke’s idea of Israel’s religious development in three stages, as well as Graf’s conclusion that the documents had been written in three different stages, and he put the two pictures together. His conclusions were the same as Vatke’s and Graf’s.
Wellhausen began to examine why these various sources existed and his theory of the combination of the two sources began to gain acceptance, and came to be known as the Documentary Hypothesis. In the English speaking countries, the documentary Hypothesis owed a lot of credit to William Robertson Smith, professor of Old Testament in Scotland, because he was the well-respected editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Things began to change in the twentieth century because of Pope Pius XII encouraging scholars to pursue the history of the writers of these documents, to the extent he thought they were “the living and reasonable instrument of the Holy Spirit.” As a result, the Catholic Jerome Biblical Commentary arrived on the scene in 1968, one of the many books, journals, and articles dealing with biblical studies and contributing to modern theological pursuits.
Before 1200 B.C. when the region that came to be known as Israel, was a land inhabited by many nationalities, among which were the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Gorgashites, and the Jebusites. The Philistines also shared that land, but they originally came from the Greek Islands.
The land in which the Israelites lived was bordered by Phoenicia in the north. On the Eastern border to the north was Syria, then Ammon, then Moab, then Edom to the south. The 13 tribes of Israel were the largest population in that region, from the twelfth century B.C. on. In addition to the bordering countries, there were influences from Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The dominant religion of the region was paganism, which many to this day believe is idol-worshiping. This view was formerly held until the immense archaeological findings gave mankind a better understanding of the pagan religion, and proved that it was not idol-worshipping as a Babylonian tablet points out. The discoveries at Nineveh alone, which unearthed 50,000 tablets, and in the Canaanite city of Ugarit three thousand more were found, revealing that paganism was a religion of nature, worshipping the sky, the storm, the sun, the sea, and the wind, etc. and it was due to the people being and feeling close to nature. We can compare the statues of these ancients to the icons of Mary and Jesus, found in churches today, but this does not mean they worshipped these icons rather they served to remind the people of the deity’s presence.
The chief pagan god perceived in the Canaan region where all these nationalities lived, was EL. El was male, patriarchal, and ruler over the people. He sat at the head of the council of the gods, (the Elohim) and pronounced the council’s decision. In the northern region of Canaan, where it became known as Israel, and where the majority of the population lived, the Israeli god eventually became known as Yahweh, also male, patriarchal, and ruler over the people. To date, we do not know where the word Yahweh came from, but as biblical scholars point out repeatedly, it comes from YHWH, translated erroneously as “he is who he is, or “I am that I am” and other such unreliable meanings. In Exodus 3:13-15 supposedly Moses asks God what is his name that sends him to speak to the children of Israel, and God says to Moses, “Eheya Asher Eheyeh” translated by the Western translators as “Asher” and written in Arabic as Ashar, but could this be the Akkadian word, ASHUR, the name of the Assyrian God?
Biblical scholars always write, “The People of Israel spoke Hebrew,” but no one has ever been able to define what it is exactly. Is it a language of the people who lived in Hebron? If so, what did the other tribes speak, who did not live in Hebron? As we know the Jews use the Ashuri (Assyrian) script to write, thus how was that different from “Hebrew?”
Among the other nationalities that shared the region of Canaan, Phoenician, Ugarit, Aramaic, and Moabite was spoken. The people in those times wrote documents on papyrus, and sealed them with a stamp pressed in clay. They also wrote on leather, clay tablets, and even stone and plaster.
There are traditions about the prehistory of the Israelites, but none that have been proven through archaeology. According to biblical scholars, the first point at which we actually begin to have sufficient evidence to picture a life of the biblical community is the twelfth century B.C., when the Israelites became established in this territory.
The Israelites’ political life was organized around tribes. According to biblical tradition, there were thirteen tribes. Twelve of them each had a distinct geographical territory. The thirteenth, the tribe of Levi, was a priestly group. The members of the Levi tribe lived in cities in the other tribe’s territories. Each tribe had their own chosen leader. There were others who acquired authority through their positions in society, among which, were judges and priests. The office of judges involved legal matters and military issues. Judges and prophets could be male or female, whereas priests only males. Usually the priests had to be from the tribe of Levi and their office was hereditary. They presided over religious sites, and conducted religious ceremonies, which was mostly sacrifices. Being a prophet did not require a special office. A person from any background could become a prophet, male or female.
The age of judges culminated with the prophet Samuel, who was considered to be a judge, a priest, and a prophet. He lived in Shiloh, a city in the northern part of the land of Canaan, and a major religious center at the time. According to biblical accounts, a tabernacle was located there which supposedly housed the “ark of the covenant” containing the tablets of the Ten Commandments. A distinguished priestly family lived in Shiloh, and some believed they were descendants of Moses. When the Philistine domination of the land became overwhelming, the people sought a leader, who could unite the tribes as a king. Samuel anointed the first king of Israel, King Saul. This was the beginning of the Israeli monarchy, and although there were to be no more judges, there continued to be priests and prophets.
A king needed the support of the priests in order to gain the respect of the people, and to generate an army. There was no separation of religion and state, so that when Saul overstepped his bounds with the priests, Samuel anointed another king, David, who was the ruler of the tribe of Judah. Saul enraged, had all the priests of Shiloh massacred, except for one, which escaped. Saul reigned over the northern Kingdom, whereas David was ruler over his southern kingdom of Judah. Saul maintained the northern throne until his death, when the kingdom was split in half between Saul’s son Ishbaal in the north, and King David in the south, ruling over his own tribe of Judah, which was the largest of the tribes put together. When Ishbaal was assassinated, David became king over the entire country, north and south. King David established a long line of Davidic kingship descended from him. The Davidic dynasty became the longest ruling family of any country in the history, and established the messiah tradition of both Judaism and Christianity.
King David united the two kingdoms and moved his capital from Hebron, (which was the principle city of Judah) to Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been occupied by the Jebusites, before David conquered the city, therefore it was not affiliated with any of the tribes of Israel, hence did not offend any of the competing tribes. David’s second action was to appoint two priests to represent the unity of the two kingdoms: His northern priest was Abiathar, who was the only priest that had escaped the Shiloh priestly massacre David’s southern priest was Zadok, who came from David’s former capital city of Hebron in Judah. Zadok and his priestly order were regarded as descendents of Aaron, the first high priest of Israel. Hence, David’s two priests represented both respected priestly families: The family of Moses and the family of Aaron.
David established a professional army, no longer depending on the individual tribes to muster soldiers. By one military campaign after another, David successfully brought Moab, Ammon, and maybe even Syria, under his dominion. He built a large dynasty and made Jerusalem both the political as well as the religious center of his empire. He brought the “ark of the covenant” there and established his priests there as well. David married many women and had many children, all of whom contended for the throne. But in his old age, David chose Solomon, the son of his favorite wife, Bathsheba, to succeed him.
Biblical sources, in order to embellish Solomon’s wealth, suggest that Solomon had nearly 700 wives and 300 concubines. He married women for political alliances. The Bible also tells us that Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem, in which he placed the ark. The interior of the temple was divided into two rooms, an outer room called the Holy, and an inner chamber called the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies was a perfect cube, twenty cubits long, wide and high. In it were two tremendous statues, which could be best described as winged-bulls, like the Assyrian lamasus. They were the throne platform of Yahweh. The ark, containing the Ten Commandments was placed under the Lamasu’s open wings, (which made a tent). Solomon received help for building the temple at Jerusalem as well as his palace from Hiram of Tyre, king of the Phoenicians, who was Solomon’s father-in-law. Hiram provided Solomon the cedars of Lebanon and 120 talents of gold. In return, Solomon gave Hiram a tract of the northern Israelite territory containing twenty cities. In this manner, Solomon was building up his own capital at the expense of the north.
Solomon’s domestic and foreign policy threatened the unity of his kingdom. Moreover, Solomon established twelve administrative districts, each of which was to provide for the court in Jerusalem for one month of the year. The boundaries of these districts did not correspond with the boundaries of the twelve tribes. He personally appointed the heads of each administrative district, which were in opposition to the twelve heads of the tribes. He also instituted the missim system, a sort of labor tax, in which each citizen owed a month of work for the government, each year. This was seen by the people as the same system the Egyptians imposed on the Jews in Egypt, when they were made into labor slaves. Consequently, Solomon was barely holding on to the kingdom, facing resentments and hostilities.
When Solomon dies, his son Rehoboam succeeded him, and he didn’t have the skills of his father to keep the kingdom together. When Rehoboam went to Shechem, a major northern city for his coronation, the northern leaders asked him if he intended to carry out his father’s policies. His answer was yes. They rebelled against him and stoned to death his officer in charge of missim, a signal that they would not be in bondage as they were in Egypt. Rehoboam only ruled Judah, the southern part of the kingdom. The rest of Israel chose Jeroboam as their king. David’s empire now was split again: Israel in the north, and Judah in the south. Rehoboam ruled from Jerusalem, the city of David, and Jeroboam made Shechem the capital of the new northern kingdom. They still shared a common religion, in which both worshipped Yahweh, but the country was divided politically. The temple, the ark, the chief priests were all located in Jerusalem, This meant that on holidays and special occasions, masses of Jeroboam’s population would have to go the city of David, pray and sacrifice at the temple of Solomon, and they would have to see the king Rehoboam, and this did not please Jeroboam. Jeroboam could not make up a new religion, to keep the people from going to Jerusalem. But he could establish for his new kingdom its own national version of the common religion. The kingdom of Israel like the kingdom of Judah went on to worship Yahweh, but Jeroboam established new religious centers, new holidays, new priests, and new symbols of the religion. The new religious centers that were to replace Jerusalem were Beth-El and Dan. His new symbol of the religion became two golden calves, which replaced the Lamasus in Jerusalem. Calves in Hebrew translated into “young bulls,” and they were associated with El, the chief of the Canaanite gods, who was referred to as “Bull El.” This gesture of Jeroboam affiliated Yahweh with El. This might have meant to give the people the impression that Jeroboam was uniting the two kingdoms religiously, by implying that Yahweh and El were one. Jeroboam set-up one of the golden calves in Beth-El and one in Dan, signaling that God is enthroned over the entire kingdom, from the north to the south.
The northern Levites had suffered humiliation and betrayal, because many of them lived in the cities given to Hiram, and of all of them, the priests from Shechem had suffered the most. They had previously held high positions in society but now were out of power in Jerusalem. This made them feel betrayed and excluded, especially when Jeroboam did not appoint them at Beth-El or Dan. They had no place in Jeroboam’s new religion, and they condemned the golden calves as heresy. The nation was now more divided religiously than ever before, and the political situation was deteriorating rapidly, as the age of empires was coming to the forefront. This left Israel and Judah vulnerable to powerful nations like Egypt and Assyria.
In Israel, the monarchy was unstable, and the kingdom lasted only two hundred years. Then Assyria conquered it in 722 B.C. deporting many Israelites into the Assyrian empire. The exiled Israelites have come to be known as the 10 lost tribes of Israel.
In Judah, on the other hand, the monarchy had been extremely stable, and one of the longest reigning dynasties known in history, which is most likely why Judah survived one hundred years past the destruction of Israel.
During the two hundred years in which these two kingdoms lived side by side, there lived two of the writers that have been identified as J and E. Each of these writers composed their own version of the history of their people, and both versions became part of the Bible. These two versions describe some of the same events, but in different order.
Two of the writers of the first two sources, J and E, lived during those times described thus far. The writer of E came from Israel because he was concerned by matters that occurred in Israel, while the writer of J came from Judah because he was concerned with the events in Judah. Moreover, the group of stories that invoke the name of Elohim are all the tribes of Israel, which lost their territories and merged with other tribes, while the group of stories that invoke the name of Yahweh are the Judah tribe, the only tribe that maintained its territory.
Biblical scholars have tried to sort the history behind the two different versions of the doublets, as well as their writers, to try to identify these authors as well as their motives for writing what they did. They nearly always begin with the story of the two golden calves in which Aaron tells the people, “these are your Gods, Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt.” In the meantime, Moses is supposedly on Mount Sinai, speaking to God and God tells him what the people are doing below. God tells Moses that he will destroy the people for worshipping other gods, and that he will start a new people descended from Moses. Moses pleads with god not to destroy his people, and God relents. When Moses comes down the mountain, and he sees the golden calves, he becomes angry and smashes the Ten Commandments. The question is why the writer of this story would depict the people as rebellious against their God Yahweh, especially at a time when they had just been delivered from Egyptian bondage? According to most scholars, the reason being is that the writer of E is a Levite priest from Shiloh, a descendant of Moses, which is why he makes Moses a hero and deliverer of his people out of Egypt, and a superior priest, chosen by god to lead them to the promised land.. Based on all the evidence and history which points to the priests of Shiloh’s suffering immensely under Solomon, having had their chief priest, Abiathar, expelled from Jerusalem, and their lamasus replaced by the golden calves, the writer of E was resentful of Aaron’s priestly order, (the Levites of Judah) which is why he wrote negatively about them. The E document was written before the Assyrian conquest.
Israel falls in 722 B.C. and the 10 tribes of Israel are deported to various parts of the Assyrian Empire, forcing those who fled this conquest to become refugees in Judah.
The J writer, however, was a priest descendant from Aaron’s priestly order, favors Judah, and only has allegiance to Yahweh, which leads him to write his own version of the stories found in the Pentateuch. Hence, the writer of J never mentions the tabernacle, and he focuses on God leading his people out of bondage, instead of Moses. The evidence we have thus far points to the J version being written after the Assyrian conquest.
These two different versions of the same book led to three separate investigations to find out who these two writers were and who cut and pasted these stories together so cleverly to make one continuous story.
The third writer, D, writes the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a collection of history from Moses to the destruction of Judah by the Babylonians, in 587 B.C. The D writer however, states that the kingdom is eternal, and tried to unite the two kingdoms as one. D wrote the beginning of his people’s history, flowing through the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. He makes King Josiah righting all the wrongs of Aaron, Solomon, and Jeroboam, and the culmination of three centuries. This means at the end of the destruction of the two kingdoms, the E writer comes back as D. The D writer takes all the stories from the day his people arrived in the land, the stories of Joshua, Jericho, the conquest, and made it into the book of Joshua. He took the stories of the people’s early years, the stories of Deborah, Gideon, and Samson, and made it into the book of Judges. He placed the stories of Samuel at Shiloh, and told the stories of Saul and David, (the first kings) and it became the book of Samuel I. He set the court history of King David and this became Samuel 2. He then took the stories of kings who came after David and put it into one continuous story till the time of Josiah. This became Kings I and II.
The Deuteronomist also made it clear that the temple in Jerusalem became the central place of worship where God’s name dwelt. He made his people’s history try to show fidelity to Yahweh, and that the covenant was with the Davidic line, and focused on the Torah. He also alluded to the fact that the kingdom split because Solomon forsook Yahweh and his Torah. He also maintains that David’s line retained Jerusalem and Judah because God made unconditional covenant promise to David. He asserts that the kingdom of Israel fell because Jews did not follow the Torah, and were exiled because they had worshipped other gods and broken the first commandment, (Thou shall not worship other Gods). All this he wrote while in exile.
Scholars now agree that there was a second Deuteronomist who wrote that it was not the kings’ fault but the people’s actions and infidelity to their own covenant with God that brought the Jews and their kingdoms down. The second Deuteronomist also stated that the throne now was always available, should a messiah come and rule justly. This became the central element of Christianity and Judaism.
Conclusion
Scholars now maintain that it was Jeremiah who dictated D1 and D2 plus the book of Jeremiah to Baruch, who wrote all three. They cite evidence of the seal found in 1980 declaring, “Belonging to Baruch, son of Neriyeh the scribe.” written in the late seventh and early sixth century B.C. The only convincing argument may be that because Baruch did go into exile with Jeremiah, and that he is mentioned several times in the Bible as writing for Jeremiah. Biblical scholars claim this is sufficient proof of his authorship of the eight books of the Old Testament.
The J writer never mentions man is created in God’s image in the Garden of Eden story, while the P writer never speaks of talking snakes or powerful plants. The writers of J, E, and D source documents picture god in a personal way, on earth, taking visible forms, speaking and debating with humans, while the P source focuses on the cosmic picture, and God as Yahweh. In the P source, obedience is rewarded, transgression is punished, whereas J and E source document writers focus on divine aspect of mercy, where transgression is forgiven by repentance, through Moses’ plea and God’s relenting, while in P there’s no pleading from Moses. P focuses on divine justice but J, E, and D focus on divine mercy.
According to modern biblical scholars, Ezra joined these stories together, consequently Ezra is the R, (Redactor) who was an advocate of Aaronoid priests and who rose to leadership position after Cyrus the Great returned the Israelites back to their lands. Ezra is thus the man who preserves all these writers’ works for millennia.
So far we have given some insight into the motivation of many of the figures who played a part in writing the Bible, as well as some of the reasons behind writing what they did, but we have yet to discuss whether or not there were real prophets in Israel, whether or not any of their prophecies came true, what archaeology has uncovered in recent years, and whether or not the archaeological evidence validates the biblical narration. Furthermore, we have not yet fully explored the question whether or not the ark of the covenant containing the Ten Commandments really existed, whether or not there was a Jewish Exodus out of Egypt, what role if any, did the Assyrians play in the cultural and religious development of the Israelites, and if the Bible was a direct response to religious fundamentalism, as opposed to actual and real history of a nation. These and many other questions will be explored in the next article, part II.
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Halpern, Baruch. Sacred History and Ideology: Chronicles’ Thematic Structure-Indications of an Earlier Source.” In Richard Elliot Friedman, ed. The Creation of Sacred Literature.
R,J. Thompson. Moses and the Law in a Century of Criticism Since Graf, pp. 42f.
